Letters to the Editor

Tuesday

Sep 30, 2008 at 2:00 AM

Sept. 29 — To the Editor:

Sept. 29 — To the Editor:

To all the voters who graciously wrote in my name as a Republican candidate for state Legislature for Portsmouth in the recent primary I appreciate your vote but unfortunately am unable, at this present time, to serve if elected.

Since I received enough write-in votes to be have my name placed on the general election ballot, I have requested the Secretary of State remove my name from the general election ballot in November. Again I truly thank you for your time, effort, and confidence in me to write my name on the ballot, and although I will not be a Republican candidate for the Legislature, will continue to serve the political concerns of the Portsmouth community.

Bill St. Laurent

Portsmouth

Sept. 28 — To the Editor:

Let me get this straight ... we're going to give $700 billion we don't have to a group of bankers who don't need it, and this idea is being approved by politicians who can't explain it?

The conventional wisdom is that the Bush administration and their wholesale deregulation of the financial markets caused this mess, therefore government must be given more authority to regulate the industry. This is a delusion. While Bush and his band of fools certainly played a role in increasing the risks, it is utter nonsense to blame them for the entirety of this meltdown.

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977 under the Carter administration, gave government the authority to "encourage" mortgage lending by penalizing financial institutions that didn't approve loans to people who didn't have the credit to meet existing loan standards. The regulators forced the lenders to relax their standards, not the other way around.

The federal government now had the authority to apply severe economic leverage to businesses that didn't comply. Such as not allowing mergers or acquisitions. That's the federal definition of encourage. Naturally, businesses complied, and the loans were then filtered through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in order to make more money available and distribute more loans.

This is when the roller coaster ride began.

Then, in 1993, Bill Clinton ordered new regulations for the Community Reinvestment Act. These regulations "increased access" to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities. Thus began in earnest the disbursement of loans to people who couldn't afford them.

The roller coaster ride was picking up speed.

These regulations were amended again in 1995 and then in 2005 to create different rules for institutions of different sizes, so that various kinds of institutions would be better able to meet the government's goals for fostering home ownership in lower income communities. This is why so many different financial institutions got into trouble when the inevitable meltdown began.

At the same time that the roller coaster ride was teetering on its tracks, the regulators were adding cars and more passengers.

And now, the same politicians who voted all this legislation in are telling us the whole thing is the fault of Wall Street and deregulation. I don't expect politicians to be truthful, but where is the national news media on any of this?

If we survive this abomination, be prepared to bailout the health care industry, which is the next roller coaster ride we're all in such a hurry to enact. This is because the health-care debate is guided by precisely the same set of principles as the housing debate. Just as yesterday's conventional wisdom told us it was every Americans' right to own a home, today we are told we also have a right to health care. And government is going to make sure we get it.

The truth is that despite everyone's best intentions, government is utterly incapable of managing housing or health care. Furthermore, this abuse of power is a threat to our national security, and not just because they are bankrupting us. The bureaucrats are so busy trying to legislate all this nonsense, they are completely mismanaging the one thing they have a constitutional responsibility to manage. That is, the defense of the nation and our foreign policy.

Neal Fitzgerald

Portsmouth

Sept. 29 — To the Editor:

Does anyone else find it novel to hear Sen. Judd Gregg's voice on National Public Radio, mellow about the $700 billion bailout with taxpayer dollars of banks that made reckless decisions while free of regulation? His 9/29 analogy that doing the extraordinary bailout is "like clearing an accident from a road, for traffic to resume" is a bit off. This bailout is like building a new highway around an accident, for traffic to continue.

It becomes hard to remember what Gregg looks or sounds like, so little does he consort with us, his irrelevant constituency.

I'm itching to remind voters that 2010, the end of Gregg's term, nears. Reading the Sunday New York Times review of Bob Woodward's new book on Bush, I read about Bush "stubbornly refus[ing] to accept, even as the evidence mounts, that a military strategy based on Rumsfeld's lean troop levels and the lack of a viable post-invasion plan make the 'victory' [Bush] demands thoroughly unachievable."

Gregg supports that no-post-invasion plan. He must. He's never uttered otherwise, but on June 2, 2005, when six of us would not leave his Concord office (subsequently we were arrested), his staff could tell us that he had no answer, Gregg didn't, to our question about an exit strategy for Iraq. The U.S. service personnel dead that day numbered 1,066. Now the number nears 5,000, with 12-13 seriously wounded for every one dead. (My arresting officer said it was 700-something when he left Iraq.)

Gregg is ranking member of the U.S. Senate's Standing Committee on the Budget, evidence he cares about money and how it's spent. (Well, except that the Iraq war costs $10 billion a month and is all borrowed money, and Gregg never utters a word about that poor judgment). Would that some humanity showed up in him — but it hasn't yet — to care also about how military lives are spent.

If Gregg had such care, regardless of being Republican, he'd make an effort to end deaths of Americans and Iraqis in the Middle East, and not just mildly lounge along, comfortable, in Bush's shadow. Only so many more days of "the decider" Bush, and only a couple of years more of unimpressive Gregg.

Lynn Rudmin Chong

Sanbornton

Sept. 26 — To the Editor:

Just weeks ago at their national convention, the Republican Party nominated John McCain for president and reaffirmed in its 2008 platform that government should neither interfere in the problems of the free market system nor "support government bailouts of private institutions."

Since then, we've witnessed the collapse of investment banks Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the growing insolvency and government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Bush administration's rescue of insurance giant AIG to the tune of $85 billion.

In the latest installment of our economic meltdown, the Bush administration, representing the self-proclaimed party of small government, fiscal responsibility and an unfettered free market system, has proposed a $700-plus billion Wall Street rescue plan. Bush's original plan (only 2½ pages long) was chillingly short on details but did grant Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson absolute power to dispense almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars with no provisions for oversight, accountability or legal challenge by Congress or taxpayers footing the bill. If the current economic situation seems familiar, it is. Recall the Savings & Loan crisis of the Reagan/Bush era (Google John McCain and the Keating Five scandal) when American taxpayers were forced to pay in the neighborhood of $125 billion to prevent the collapse of a corrupt and out-of-control banking system. So when Republicans say they believe in unregulated financial markets, that's only when Wall Street is fat, happy and profitable. When the economy and Wall Street go south, however, the Republicans insist that taxpayers must ante up to save American capitalism. Put simply, this is privatized profit-taking and socialized loss, and while it may be socialism, it certainly can't be called capitalism.

Until two weeks ago, John McCain was a lifelong advocate of deregulation. Now he shouts for stricter controls on the financial sector, the firing and then resignation of the SEC chairman and has become a self-proclaimed crusader against corruption and excessive compensation on Wall Street. Last week, McCain "suspended" his presidential campaign hoping to personally broker a bipartisan bailout agreement. When asked in an interview whether he supported Bush's 2-3 page bailout proposal, McCain said he hadn't read it yet. As Democrats and Republicans in Washington were about to finalize a deal, McCain, trying to play the role of elder statesman and national leader, interjected presidential politics into a very delicate, complex and tense situation and managed to sabotage the negotiations. So instead of becoming the triumphant hero, McCain found himself without an agreement and in the middle of a Republican civil war.

While McCain likes to pretend he's a man of principle and that his policy positions and campaign decisions put country first, the truth is that he and his Republican colleagues have brought this country to its economic knees. The dire economic situation we find ourselves in today, the worst since the Great Depression, did not happen by accident. It is a direct consequence of more than 25 years of fundamentally flawed economic policies that put the interests of corporations and the wealthy above those of hard working Americans and the country. And the final result may be that McCain and friends have destroyed the American Dream and the futures of my two children. Take note McCain, working and middle class Americans like me are angry, fed up and mobilized for action, and we're going to express our displeasure in the voting booth.

David B. Munsey

Exeter

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